“Occupy With Aloha” singer gaining fame

While the APEC world leaders meeting in Honolulu made relatively few headlines outside of Hawai‘i — where the traffic jams caused by security measures were definitely newsworthy — the slack key guitarist who performed a protest song at the event’s formal dinner last Saturday continues to attract attention.

In case you missed the original story, singer-songwriter Makana, by his own account, “sang a few verses from ‘Kaulana Na Pua’ (a famous Hawaiian protest song in honor of the anniversary of our Queen’s passing), then segued into Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ Sting’s ‘Fragile,’ and finally my newest song, ‘We Are The Many,’ ” while heads of state and others dined at Hale Koa. He also opened his suit jacket to reveal a T-shirt reading “Occupy With Aloha” during the performance , which was captured surreptitiously on video , according to Makana, by his guitar tech, who used a camera phone despite a Secret Service ban on such devices. Posting an annotated live video on YouTube the next day, Makana wrote,

My goal was not to disturb the guests in an offensive fashion but rather to subliminally fill their ears and the entire dinner atmosphere with a message that might be more effectively received in a subconscious manner. I sweetly sang lines like “You enforce your monopolies with guns/ While sacrificing our daughters and sons/ But certain things belong to everyone/ Your thievery has left the people none”. The event protocol was such that everyone there kept their expressions quite muffled. Now and then I would get strange, befuddled stares from heads of state. It was a very quiet room with no waiters; only myself, the sound techs, and the leaders of almost half the world’s population.

If I had chosen to disrupt the dinner and force my message I would have been stopped short. I instead chose to deliver an extremely potent message in a polite manner for a prolonged interval.

I dedicate this action to those who would speak truth to power but were not allowed the opportunity.

News of Makana’s stealthy but sweet-voiced subversion soon spread, with reports from the UK Daily Mail, CNN and other news outlets of varying political stripes, including an interview yesterday with Sean Hannity on Fox News. On Tuesday Makana performed the song for about 60 Occupy Honolulu protesters, according to Honolulu Civil Beat, and has also made free downloads of song (also performed in the video below) available on his Web site. Numerous versions of the song now appear on Youtube and various Occupy Facebook pages, with more than 350,000 views combined, and counting.

If that doesn’t sound especially superviral to you, contrast that number with Makana’s most-watched videos of Hawaiian slack key guitar music, incendiary only in the sense of passion and skill, such as “Ka Wailele O Nu‘uanu” (33,000-plus views) or his interpretation of Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” (46,000). Not that I’m accusing him of staging the protest just to attract attention. If you’ve read his personal or public Facebook posts for a while, as I have, you know he’s nothing if not sincere.

And whether or not you agree with his Occupy politics, I give him props for choosing to sing “Kaulana Nā Pua,” written by Ellen Keho‘ohiwaokalani Wright Prendergast in January 1893. The opening stanza: “Famous are the children of Hawai’i, / ever loyal to the land, / when the evil-hearted messenger comes / with his greedy document of extortion.”

According to Elbert & Mahoe’s “Nā Mele O Hawai‘i Nei,” cited on www.huapala.org, where the lyrics appear in Hawaiian and English, “Members of the Royal Hawaiian Band visited her and voiced their unhappiness at the takeover of the Hawaiian Kingdom. They begged her to put her feelings of rebellion to music.”

Apparently, for many in the Occupy movement, that’s what Makana has now done.